Central
Cloud management. You can put all of the access points—those aggregated into that self-managing cluster, and individual access points—into a cloud-managed system. The cost of cloud management is small, and if you’re a school system or library the Federal Government will cover most of the cost of a five-year management license under e-Rate; making this small management cost even smaller. Cloud management gives you more management features with lots of custom reports, automatic bulk software updates, the ability to store and later dissect any wireless session for analysis, and the ability to incorporate switch management with access point management— wired and wireless monitoring and management in the same pane of glass.
Central also gives you contact tracing, if you need that service for security or contagion prevention.
Controller management. You can also manage the access points using a local controller, and if you do that you substitute the cost of a piece of hardware for the cost of a management subscription. You can also use a controller as a secure router, separating and controlling all wireless (and wired) sessions so that you don’t have to establish VLANs, ACL’s, and other programmed controls—all access control is dynamically handled in the controller, which can make access, privileges and control as dynamic and as fine-grained as you wish. Just work on making the pipes big enough, and the controller will automatically do all of the separation, prioritization, session control, and security.
And—unlike the offerings from the other major competitor that make you change out all your hardware when you change management, you can use the same access points in any management mode, and swap management modes to accommodate your changing circumstances with not a single change in access point hardware.